Barn Burning Essay

Words: 2174
Pages: 9

Antonio Webb

Professor Debra Germany

English 2336

14 November 2012

Barn Burning

In “Barn Burning”, a short story by William Faulkner, a boy finds that he can no longer be governed by his father’s ideas and tries to prevent his father from doing further harm, and leaves his family in the process. Sarty Snopes desire is to break away from the moral deficiency of his family life and live life with some resemblance of normalcy even at the expense of never seeing his family again. A growing body of evidence, suggest that humans have a moral sense from the very start of life and family does not instill this moral compass from the very start of life.

An astonishing series of experiments is challenging the view that human beings are born as “blank slates” – and that our

morality is shaped by our experiences. Instead, they suggest that concepts of good and bad may be hard-wired into the brain at birth. In one experiment involving puppets, six-month-old babies showed a strong preference for good helpful characters-and rejected unhelpful, “naughty” puppet, some babies went further- and dished out their own punishment with a smack on its head Professor Paul Bloom, a psychologist at Yale University in Connecticut, whose department has studied morality in babies for years, said: A growing body of evidence suggest that humans do have a rudimentary moral sense from the very start of life. You can see some glimmers of moral thought, moral judgment and moral felling even in the first year of life. Some sense of good and evil seems to be bred in the bones. In one experiment involving puppets, six-month old babies showed a strong preference for “good” helpful characters- and rejected unhelpful, “naughty” ones. In another, when asked to take away treats from a “naughty” puppet, some babies went further—and dished out their own punishment with a smack on its head. (Derbyshire, David) Professor Paul Bloom, a psychologist at Yale University in Connecticut, whose department has